TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘irex’ Category

By Paul Biba

David Carnoy of CNET is offering the following. Let’s hope he is right:

Here’s the little we know:

* 8.1-inch display
* 3G wireless connectivity (no carrier announced)
* Touch screen with stylus navigation
* Fall 2009 release

Until now iRex, one of the early e-reader pioneers (you remember the iLiad, right?), has mainly offered more business-oriented readers that are rather pricey and sold primarily to European customers. However, this model is a consumer model that will be sold in the U.S., as well as other countries (here in the States, I suspect it will cost less than $400 and possibly less than $350). Allegedly, the unit will have a tie-in with one of the large online e-book sellers, though iRex wouldn’t say which one.

By Paul Biba

The Register, the site with the best logo in the world, reviews the iRex DR1000S ereader. Here are some highlights. You can find the full review here.

… Electronic-ink screens have been pushed into the role of electronic books but, like Amazon, iRex has realised that the real money isn’t in electronic books at all, but in electronic document readers. Executives, or journalists – who have to plough through enormously long documents – will pay handsomely for a device that enables them to easily read, and make notes on, such documents with the minimum of fuss. …

In short the screen is a joy, and the device is so slim and that one quickly starts carrying it around like a clipboard, and using it in much the same way. If you ever wanted one of those electronic pads they’re always handing the captain on the Starship Enterprise then this is it. It may not have a colour screen, but everything else is here. …

… because while the hardware is superb, the user interface is the kind of mess that can only result from engineers being let loose with icons. Luckily the functionality is limited to navigating directories and a few settings, but you wouldn’t know that from the appallingly designed processes. …

Battery life is also disappointing – the capacitive screen draws power even if the display doesn’t, and we found a fully charged battery would rarely allow 10 hours of reading. We were using complex PDF files, and taking lots of notes, but we would still have hoped for longer. Luckily, the DR1000S will turn itself off after being ignored for half an hour, unlike its predecessor, the iLiad.

By David Rothman

“iRex’s subtractive color mixing technology will allow us to produce a wide range of colors in high resolution to deliver magazine-quality color to our e-reader customers.” – IRex display expert Alex Henzen.

Details: iRex’s new technology is to offer “three times the brightness of current color prototypes.” The full news release is here. The color should be helpful not only with newspapers and magazines but also in K-12 apps, which perhaps will also benefit from iRex’s efforts to ruggedize its screens.

By David Rothman

“It is definitely a logical path, and a logical conclusion, but I cannot confirm that we are working with News Corp.” - iRex CEO Hans Brons, as quoted in Peter Kafka’s piece in All Things Digital.

By Paul Biba

When I first got my Kindle 1, I reviewed two of M-Edge’s cases here and here.  Now that I have my Kindle 2 I contacted M-Edge and they were good enough to send me review units of two of their new cases.  Here we are going to look at my favorite, the Platform.  Rather than use publicity pictures I always try to take my own so that you can see what units look like in “real life”

The case is of pebbled padded leather with a strap down the front.  At the bottom the strap folds towards the back of the unit and slides into a closure on the back of the case.  As with the other M-Edge cases I’ve see, the quality is first rate with uniform, tight stitching and nice feel to the leather.  The case comes in a lot of colors, as we’ll see later, but I asked for purple because purple and green are my favorite colors.

Here you see my Kindle in the case.  Because this is an upright case M-Edge couldn’t use the new Kindle locking holder, but, like their Kindle 1 case,  the case uses two loops of leather at the bottom, and two elastic pieces at the top.  The unit is held in very securely, is easy to insert and remove, and there is no chance of it falling out.  Notice the wide purple strip to the left of the Kindle, that’s where their new booklight will go.  More on that later.

Now for my favorite part of the case, and the reason why it’s my definite first choice in Kindle cases.

(more…)

By David Rothman

"iRex Technologies has reached agreement with Adobe® to license the Reader Mobile 9 SDK, which provides support for the PDF and EPUB file formats, plus support for Adobe’s content protection technology, which it will offer on its iRex DR1000 series." - iRex announcement.

The TeleRead take: iRex Tech, much stronger in hardware than software, should be an ideal candidate for Adobe’s software developers kit.

Meanwhile the news is another indication that e-book tech is becoming increasingly modularized, with Adobe striving to provide master modules in the software area.

This could hurt Amazon/Kindle if competitors can smoothly blend in the modules and avoid Amazon’s closed approach in regard to formats and in other areas.

Letting the Kindle format run on different hardware platforms—which Amazon plans to do—is a long way from what Adobe is up to.

An iRex news release follows.

(more…)